[00:00:00] Katie Keith: As WordPress product creators, we're often pulled in two directions. There's the tempting call of paid ads that can quickly drive your website to the top of search results, versus the promise of free, long lasting traffic through organic SEO. But, in an age dominated by AI, is there even any point in trying to build organic visibility if you don't have established domain authority?

How can small and medium sized WordPress businesses realistically compete for rankings against the big players? in this episode, we will explore strategies for going from zero to SEO hero and driving sustainable growth through organic search optimization.

[00:00:46] Matt Cromwell: This is WP Product Talk, the place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go to podcast for WordPress product owners, by WordPress product owners. And now, enjoy the show.

[00:01:17] Katie Keith: Hello and welcome to WP Product Talk. I'm Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2

[00:01:23] Matt Cromwell: Plugins. And I'm Matt Cromwell from StellarWP.

[00:01:27] Katie Keith: today we're talking about an important topic a lot of people are unsure about at the moment. How to build organic SEO for your WordPress products, and is it even realistic?

[00:01:39] Matt Cromwell: And that's why we have a special guest named Alex Moss with us today. welcome, Alex. Thanks for being here.

[00:01:46] Alex Moss: Hi, Katie. Hi, Matt. How are we doing?

[00:01:48] Matt Cromwell: Good, good. How are you?

[00:01:50] Alex Moss: Great. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to be on here.

[00:01:53] Matt Cromwell: Tell the world a little bit about yourself and, why we asked you to be here.

[00:01:57] Alex Moss: I'm Alex. Principal SEO at Yoast. my role inside Yoast is basically being a layer on top of all the other teams and get involved with the product itself. It gets involved with the marketing of the website as well from an SEO perspective, give creative ideas when they're allowed, and kind of be around and being a face of Yoast, like being a guest on here.

That's it. Which is great, and I get to talk about SEO and WordPress, which is my background. before Yoast, I'm also an agency owner in organic marketing, which includes SEO. My tech SEO background has made me be a bit known in that area, but also I Developed a few plugins, nothing quite sophisticated, very, very simple ones.

And I didn't go into the paid arena because they were that simple. There was nothing my plugin could offer, but, it got me also a little bit known in the WordPress world and those two combined, maybe gave me the niche and it was a perfect fit to be at a place like Yoast, so yeah.

[00:02:54] Matt Cromwell: Thank you.

[00:02:55] Katie Keith: Excellent. So to start off, we'll talk about why does SEO matter to WordPress product owners? So Alex, what's your take on this? Why does it matter? And why should people launching a WordPress product or who's already got one bother with it?

[00:03:11] Alex Moss: SEO to me is vital. SEO shouldn't be just a person or isolated to a certain skillset

you should be involved in different aspects from product development, as well as. Marketing, because of that, you have to get your own expertise and authority out there, which is part of one of Google's EEAT abbreviations that they use to instill that you need brand marketing.

You need to be authoritative, not just as a brand, but as a person. Barn2 and Stellar both have their brand reputation and authority, and that's great, but you two, Katie and Matt, as individuals also have your own. personal brand. And with that all combined, it means word of mouth.

It's just a different technology, but the same ethics. when I grew up, when you go to careers advisors, like I could even get into marketing. And then I thought online marketing was a thing, a new thing. And then later on, I like watch Mad Men and went, wait a minute. There was. Marketing agencies back in the 60s, right?

And when I watched that, I related a lot as an online marketer, even though the medium was different. So it's kind of the same challenge in a different arena like magazines and being an authority on anything, you need to build that organically as well as maybe paying for it by, Display, which is what happens online as well.

So in product marketing to answer the question, yes, it's vital because you need to understand from an organic perspective, every part of the customer journey, how do I know that I want a WooCommerce based plugin, I may look for a solution and find Katie and read more about Katie or GiveWP, for example,

donations and then I find you read more about you and you're trustworthy you've got a product set and all of that builds to just normal brand reputation. then you've got word of mouth, which is, you know, WordPress community, right? It's a great example of word of mouth. and it goes on in layers because you are connected to WordPress devs marketers and professionals in general who will also have clients and customers and then that spreads.

yes, it is vital. it's not just from the beginning, it's from the end, We've got to deal with churn of renewals, from an SEO perspective, how do you keep that? Not just from an email campaign, but why would someone become churn? You have to work backwards, maybe they want to do something specific, and then you find out that quite a few people want to do something like that.

[00:05:23] Matt Cromwell: from a product development point of view, fill that gap. from a marketing perspective, tell people that you have filled the gaps Interesting. Hey, I have a follow up question You mentioned how, personal branding pairs really well with what we're talking about today.

we had an episode about that, was it last week before? Chris Lemma joined us a couple of weeks ago and, We talked about personal branding. It was a great episode. you can find it on our website, WPProductTalk. com, or use our little chat bot, there's some fun tools on the, on the site now that will help you, find all this insights we have about these things, about these topics.

Alex, my follow up here is essentially, I like the way that you're talking about, The value of organic search in general, but can you be really specific? Like, product marketing. We're all trying to do specific product marketing. and yeah, we want to drive traffic, but there's lots of ways that we can do it.

so, there's lots of ways in which we can talk about our products. But why is SEO right now at this nexus with AI and all that kind of thing? Why is it so important and vital for premium product marketers to be invested in SEO?

[00:06:28] Alex Moss: think about search intent. There's four main Search intents, navigational, commercial, transactional and informational.

Now AI, and we can talk more about AI and the way it's gone into search results and chat GPT, for example, it's, taking a lot of informational based stuff away from some site owners. However, that being said as an SEO, I would say, don't stop producing that content because the more content that's there and the more external parties back up what you're talking about or offering as a product, the more.

These LLMs are going to pick up that, word of mouth, which is essentially digital PR, outreach, and other channels that you do, and it includes social as well, and these LLMs look at all of those things, so it's even more important to have SEO in there.

make sure that from a product point of view, you know, what are the benefits, the solutions to what, what you're creating and, and what, why are you a benefit compared to other potential competitors as well, because when someone does discovery, they may be looking for something, and you're just in a list with.

Other products that are just like you or may do something a bit more because maybe that competitor has covered that in more long form content or done a bit more of an aggressive digital PR campaign where those features are there that people are searching for. So again, working backwards. go back to the intent and how do you fulfill that intent?

in your products and the way you deliver that to, selling it to people and keeping people.

[00:08:01] Matt Cromwell: Do you have a specific way that you think about this at Yoast? Like I know you probably don't want to, say a bunch of negative things about rank math or anything like that, but do you position yourself in a specific way?

do you have a specific example of what you're talking about with Yoast?

[00:08:17] Alex Moss: maybe if I go back to authority, I mean, Yoast is the oldest, it's the biggest, it's the original, and we still innovate and do different things as well as keeping the best use and the best SEO practice in there. I'm just one of many, SEO professionals and general skill professionals in WordPress who are part of that team.

I know that from a Yoast perspective, my presence is part of that. I've only been at Yoast for just over a year, but part of Yoast's, popularity and authority was from Yoast Devalk himself and then getting Jono on board over time just instilled that in the SEO community,

We also have our own authority and SEO, just like you two may be attractive to any WordPress based company because of who you are, not just what you know and what you can do for that company. so it is really important.

[00:09:08] Matt Cromwell: Nice. I always like it when guests butter us up on the show. It's excellent.

Keep it coming. Oh, I will. Katie, what's your take? do you think SEO is really important for Barn2?

[00:09:22] Katie Keith: I'll use that to transition into story time in which I will tell you exactly how important it is for us. at Barn2 SEO has always been from day one of selling plugins or maybe day three, if you want me to be literal.

That has been how we've had the vast majority of our sales. We were kind of lucky because, we already had a WordPress web agency and we were transitioning into selling plugins. Initially as a sideline, we didn't know if it would work, so we stuck our plugins on our existing agency website.

And that meant we had a bit of domain authority already and were ranking for some WordPress related terms like WordPress web design, WordPress development, that kind of thing. So it wasn't a huge stretch for us to start to rank for plugin related terms as well. our first plugin was really niche.

It was called WooCommerce Password Protected Categories. And so I blogged about it on our existing and it went straight to the top of Google because it was the only plugin in that category at that time. There are competitors now, but there weren't there. And literally three days after we had launched it and published our first blog post, we started getting sales.

SEO had just gone on from there. We now have a very sophisticated SEO content strategy, which is largely managed by Ellipsis, who are the company, marketing company, specializing in marketing for WordPress companies specifically. So they do our kind of keyword research and checking the search intents of different terms.

And, and then they work with me to think about what content to produce, which I then get produced. in house. that is still where we get the vast majority, like 80 percent plus of our sales, including in an AI world. it was interesting, Alex, that you were talking about how SEO actually feeds into AI because the chatbots are using your organic search presence and so on to know how to prioritize what they're recommending to people who ask about certain WordPress problems in chat.

And we have started to see a trickle of sales, from AI as well. customers telling us, ChatGPT recommended your document library plugin So, SEO is important for that too. our second biggest channel of sales is YouTube, which is way behind our organic SEO. if you think about it, YouTube is kind of SEO like because it's organic content.

You're not paying to be put on YouTube. you're producing content, which you hope has authority and real value to users. You want that to rank, whether it's on Google. or YouTube and then people buy your product after seeing it. nearly all our sales come from those channels.

So yes, I think it's important, but I do acknowledge that we're lucky because we had a head start, both from the fact that we had an agency, and then from the fact that we've now been selling plugins for eight years. So I'm interested, Alex, in your take on What new people can do. Is it realistic for a new plugin company or a developer who has released their first plugin?

Is SEO realistic on a smaller scale?

[00:12:45] Alex Moss: Oh, 100%. how are you going to gain authority if you don't? if you want to try and build it you've got to use that you can piggyback off things do a similar story and set, it is interesting. I'll share my story now.

my story is I got involved with NFTs when they were popular a few years ago. Now, I was with my wife, who was also, who's also the partner of FireCask and another two friends. We all got together and formed a marketing agency. we thought, what's not going on at the moment in the NFT space?

And this is pre, you know, the one that got in the news for the most expensive digital artwork. This was about six months before that. So we were around already when that happened and Bored Apes came out and things like that. So when it was early, we thought, I really understood the technology from a marketing point of view, right?

And the other guys, they understood the crypto space. And together, we formed quite a good team. Now, what I did was thought, well, wait a minute. If we're a marketing agency, we need to build a new site, right? So why don't I use my current agency, that's been around for 10 years, and simply create a page on there as well, right?

any leads that go onto that page will also go to our main inbox. we made the new website, and that took about three months to rank. and just on the same day, that we created the new website and published it, whilst waiting for that to happen, I made this page on firecast.

com. Let me tell you, it must have been one in the morning. I'm not a content writer, but my site has authority and it's relevant. It's a marketing agency, an online marketing agency. It was number one for NFT marketing for the entirety of the Wild West phase, that was only because of SEO. am I?

I was doing something that was honest. me and Anna were half of this company, so it still represented what we were doing. And we just sent leads to the other company the amount of leads that came in, was a bit much.

we were getting an email every 15 minutes, at some point. And from huge companies. A list celebrities, cold emailing, but I thought there were jokes at the beginning, but it turns out they were genuine. without SEO and the power of that domain's authority and connecting mine and Anna's existing authority online as marketers.

Search engines understood that we were honest had that reputation and were therefore a page to rank equating that to a new venture, yes, it's harder, but even then, it still took us three months to rank the brand new site, we marketed ourselves did digital PR and went on social channels.

Like you mentioned YouTube, it's just another source of discovery. So I think the term SEO, me. Over, I'm talking about over a generation, maybe Deprecate as a name, but we're all going to be discovery optimization experts because these channels 20 years ago, weren't around, well, they were, but not in a way that they are today.

Like TikTok, is that a social platform or is it a search engine? Because you'll get different answers, especially in the SEO industry. A lot of people consider it a search engine because people go on and search for something and discover content in the same way that YouTube has done for you,

[00:15:46] Matt Cromwell: One of the early social media platforms that I feel like served that need a lot was Pinterest, actually. I feel like they really got in early with Folks searching them for specific product ideas. Like, I need a product that will help me wash my car better. Or like, there's a lot of, different interior design type of things, that they were doing as well.

That's a really good point. Interesting point.

[00:16:09] Alex Moss: So yeah, there is still hope for new brands in this day and age. all these LLMs are doing, at the moment, they're all rappers on top of a search engine platform anyway. ChatGPT Search is essentially a Bing wrapper.

I would probably advise to maybe focus a bit more on Bing because the more you're optimized on Bing, the more you're going to be favored by ChatGPT Search. So it has knock on effects. It's like, Bing Webmaster Tools. it makes you want to concentrate more.

It's just another channel, a place to discover something. Thanks a lot.

[00:16:42] Matt Cromwell: No, I like that. I like that perspective a lot because, things are definitely rapidly changing when it comes to search in general, the intent and purpose behind SEO in the first place was to be discovered.

So, broadening the concept of what it means To get discovered online, is a big topic right now, I love the fact that Bing, in the AI tool, automatically, annotates its findings for you. I wish OpenAI would do that. I always say, tell me all these things, and where you found this information and then it gives me the links.

but Bing just does it automatically, And, Katie, didn't you say at some point that the AI referrals that you've been getting are coming from Perplexity? Is that the one?

[00:17:22] Katie Keith: It was only four or five, but they were actually tracked conversions in our analytics, and they all said Perplexity specifically.

[00:17:30] Alex Moss: Well, that may be something for the audience. I've heard of Perplexity. I've used it and it's another chat based LLM, but it's more for research. I use it for in depth research, so it would make sense that maybe a WordPress developer would use it. maybe using perplexity to gain more informationally rich content.

think of it as a bridge between ChatGPT, from a UX perspective, ChatGPT and Google, it gives you a, in a more, with images and in a SERP like, display, but yeah, at that point, it gives you more than just a couple of sources. It will give you a wide range and it's very good to be there in Perplexity as well, because it does a lot of research, so it won't just be going to Barn2 and stopping.

It'll be doing quite a bit of other objective research, which is what These platforms are supposed to do, which goes back to the, maybe you can be a new brand and still be exposed on here because I would like to hope that these are trained not to just like the big monopolies of the big companies, and that, you know, discovery can be not just for Goliath.

[00:18:33] Katie Keith: I suppose they're trying to replicate what a real person doing their own research would do. you talk about being on perplexity and how that's valuable. You also said about it's worth optimising for Bing. How would you advise optimising for specific search engines or AI platforms rather than just general best practices?

[00:18:53] Alex Moss: Sorry, when I say optimise for Bing, I would probably rephrase that to use Bing Webmaster tools. Just as much as Google Webmaster Tools don't just solve for Google's asks, solve for Bing's asks as well. while some are similar and there is standardization between the two, Bing has its little things just like Google

especially in the product area, it's going more From the commercial point of view. So again, from an SEO feed perspective, structured data perspective, the more you can optimize with structured data. I can plug Yoast, we've got WooCommerce, Yoast WooCommerce, and that adds all of that layered content.

the LLMs at the moment seem to find it easier to digest and therefore easier to output in the right context. it will soon have feeds where you can connect things together. just like Google Merchant Center is used, not just inside the Merchant Center in shopping, but elsewhere it's interpreted.

gaining all of that structured data and filling in the gaps there, is really handy.

[00:19:53] Matt Cromwell: Okay.

[00:19:55] Katie Keith: let's move on to your story time, Matt.

[00:19:58] Matt Cromwell: I've been thinking about this quite a bit because I feel like what Alex is describing is kind of this arc of discoverability over time and how SEO is changing. That's definitely been my experience as well. it's been frustrating in a lot of ways, to try to, Chase, what I feel like is a bit of a moving target, but, overall, I could say really clearly, especially with GiveWP, that, organic search results were 10x of any other channel when we launched.

our organic search results were what made us be discovered. besides our presence on WordPress. org, between those two, that covered the large majority of what we were looking for. we had some advantages. we were pretty early to market in terms of, a dedicated donation plugin for WordPress.

and not a lot of people get to have that opportunity anymore in the WordPress space. being first to market to any kind of, significant niche product is kind of fun. a lot harder today than it was back then, we could get found with non branded search terms like WordPress Donation Plugin, and it's a lot harder to get found that way now, but today, of course, we see that non branded search terms are a lot harder for us to get than the Branded search terms are.

so of course, we're constantly wanting to get tons of traffic from branded search terms. that means they found us or discovered us in some other way and then go straight to Google, to find our website, or to find any resource about us, But, we're constantly trying to fight for WordPress Donation Plugin again.

that one has become harder than it used to be. anything related to online fundraising. online fundraising plugin or online fundraising software or any of these generic tools that people are using for intending to find our product. so, that's the, a bit of the moving target part, where suddenly, especially around, last year, all kinds of search results got a lot harder, for a lot of people.

a lot of folks are blaming the Google algorithm. I do see the intent and the purpose behind all of the eat related, intentions, but I don't particularly find, getting Reddit results as my first result for everything, as being all that beneficial. like, that to me is not the most authoritative source for most of the questions I'm asking.

if Reddit results are getting, ahead of my website for things that I know that I'm authoritative on, it's pretty frustrating. So, I actually, absolutely, Love the idea of having more funnels for discoverability. YouTube has definitely been a huge boon for a lot of folks.

especially the ones who are able to leverage it well. being found through other platforms like, I don't necessarily see TikTok as being particularly useful for Give at the moment. although non profit folks are on TikTok, they're usually there for fun and not for fundraising. so it's been a struggle, overall, our focus, not only at Give, but in a lot of the Stellar brands has been to invest a lot more in YouTube, particularly because of how powerful that is as a search and discovery tool.

specifically because it feels like anybody searching for our products on YouTube has the intent to find and potentially buy them. whereas other types of generic organic terms that we might, get traffic for, they're not looking to buy. They're just looking to understand something about fundraising or about event marketing or something like that.

but YouTube search seems to be very highly relevant search in general. so, what I am, more and more interested in is what you've been finding, Katie, in terms of actually tracking, referral traffic from AI sources specifically. I find that to be highly interesting and yes, I have optimized, our websites on Bing web tools for years now.

and we actually had do a little bit of paid spend on Bing as well as Google ads. And, and do find it to be useful, but it's nowhere near as much referrals as Google ads are, for the same spend. even Facebook ads sometimes have better referral traffic than Bing ads I do find it valuable, but it's pretty far down the list.

if, everything with open AI starts to make it more valuable, that would be, revolutionary. it would be wonderful to see anything rival, Google's search intent or YouTube search intent. they still remain very dominant when it comes to the traffic that we get at least.

So that's me in a nutshell.

[00:24:22] Alex Moss: That's really interesting. I was thinking quite a lot while you were talking about audience, target audiences, perspectives, the way in which you were talking about TikTok. Yeah, maybe TikTok is not the best on GiveWP, but you mentioned, you know, there's people on there who are busy doing fundraising rather than, but maybe that person who's, a micro influencer It's their audience, that knock on effect, which goes back to perspective, which Google did talk about just before Reddit.

And whilst I do agree, not all Reddit answers are the best, I thought more about how they were talking about perspective if you want to get the broadest perspective, And the most varied information on the human species, the highest of the highs and definitely the lowest of the lows.

Actually, Reddit is a good contender for that dataset, it's a machine trying to understand the human mind. is ready, right? And I did find that interesting, but perspectives is interesting because then that does go into influencer marketing. Like YouTube may work for Katie, but not for you because of the type of person that you're both targeting.

And whilst you are still maybe targeting a WordPress developer, that's not the only persona in your audience Who's deciding who's going to make the website? Are you in that plugin list? if not, who's making that list?

Because it's not always the developer. Maybe it's the fundraising expert who has nothing to marketing, but in their last company used GiveWP and now they need it in the new one because The competitor plugin isn't doing that thing. it's a hard game to play, but it's fun because you can share the knowledge,

Even though you're not competitors, to a normal person you are, Because you both own WordPress products, but they do such different things for different people. one person will have a very big need and reliance for something that isn't going to be needed by the other.

development company,

[00:26:11] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, for sure. the other thing I think about a lot with the, Reddit aspect is, I, I'm really, really into espresso. That's like a hobby of mine. I have way too much, equipment and things like that, that I do. and when I am interested in, in figuring out something, I'll go and search and it will put Reddit up there pretty high.

And then. I totally click on Reddit threads. I want to see people talking about the thing I'm interested in here. Like, I want to hear what people think about this one machine, whether it's good enough, whether it lasts a long time, how they fixed it, how they broke it. I want to hear all those conversations.

Reddit then is perfect for me. I can imagine. That same effect happening for folks who are just like generally building their WordPress website. They're like, I need to build a WordPress website. how do I do that? And they get a Reddit thread all about oh, I use Astra. I use Cadence.

I use this. I use that. and they're like, This is exactly what I need it makes tons of sense it's still WordPress and valuable for that audience in particular. that's where our products are and then there's a little bit different because we're a niche within a niche.

it's not just a website, it's a WordPress website, and then it's not just the WordPress website, it's the specific plugin that you need for that specific need. in that case, the search intent is a little bit different. It's like, I need to fundraise online with my WordPress website.

by the time you get down to that niche, it's a much smaller group of people. The hyper focused content that we have on GiveWP, for example, would be way more valuable than a random conversation about online fundraising in Reddit. So, yeah, it's good stuff.

[00:27:48] Katie Keith: Yeah, maybe they see it, the search engines are seeing it as biased or something.

Ellipsis told me that Google is currently prioritizing product pages as well as things like Reddit. and so blogs gone down a bit. So these things are always changing, but with that in mind, let's move on to a more specific discussion about exactly what product owners can do to improve their SEO.

Alex, what would you say in terms of actual tasks that a new product owner should do if they've got no SEO? How should they start? there's so much like keywords and research and all that. what should they do as a starting point?

[00:28:26] Alex Moss: Okay, so the best advice is not to chase perfection, so don't go on Google PageSpeed and go we need to get to 100, right?

Getting to 89 is fine, or even 82, because there are other things on the plate that you need to deal with. think about search intent, like I said before, are you fulfilling at least two?

If they're informational, how do you get them to commercial? If they're on commercial intent, how do you get them to transactional? And if you work backwards from that by, answering all the questions that someone would ask before they go, Hey, maybe I will purchase this plugin, then that's fine.

Fulfilling any answer that someone would ask where they question why they should leave your product, cater for that as well. And also cater for bad news, have a reply for it. I know there was a previous, yay or nay, when you were talking about one star reviews and getting defensive on one star.

By the way, yay, big time, right? Because you are right. The customer isn't always, Right, but also the customer may have a viewpoint that you can then still not sway but still Keep informed and reduce the churn. And as long as you do that, that can still cater for the person discovering as well. so that would be one thing.

The other thing is not to obsess over all the new technology. don't chase what the new thing is. Let those people chase that thing. Experiment with it. I don't know who I was listening to last week talking about, new versions of WordPress.

someone said, I never touch it before RC3. Because RC1 and 2 are always going to be a little bit buggy, but generally RC3 is fine. I always think of that. I think of that from even the iPad. I said, not getting anything before version 3, because version 1 and 2 are for data collection for Apple.

That's what that means. And then version 3 is what I think the real out of beta. Product is. so that would be my next tip. See what's going on. it's nice to discover new things like how Katie, you discovered perplexity I've known about that for a while. 'cause I do, as part of my job, need to know more about, you know, all of these platforms

it's nice to discover that. it's nice to see that something like Perplexity is being used for a final conversion. It's really good to know that, and that it's trackable for now, until someone decides to take the data away.

[00:30:42] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, exactly. that was another good buttering us up, like mentioning one of our videos that's not even one of our live ones.

The Yay or Nay series is a fun one of mine,

[00:30:51] Alex Moss: I have opinions.

[00:30:55] Matt Cromwell: We need to do more of those. Those are always fun episodes. So what's next? Katie, what's the next tip?

[00:31:03] Katie Keith: let's talk a bit about keywords because If you get the wrong one that no one's searching for, then you're just wasting your time.

keywords don't have to be as literal as they used to be, and search is getting more clever with, semantic variations, But ideally you do want to know what you're looking for. How many people are searching for each variant? for example, if I've got a restaurant plugin, I need to know are people searching for WooCommerce restaurant plugin or WooCommerce food delivery plugin or whatever in order to prioritize my content.

what kind of specific tools would you recommend?

[00:31:40] Alex Moss: first of all, discover what's coming to your site already. That's where Google Webmaster Tools or Search Console, sorry, and Bing Webmaster Tools comes in. You've then got, Google Search Trends, which has been updated in last year as well to be, more relevant, but that's very good to see, the search volume of keywords.

it tells you other, suggestions as well. So you might find new ways of writing new content and covering new things. it goes for longer tail more specific keywords the more specific it is, the less volume that comes in, but the higher quality of that visitor.

So when Matt was saying, there's not too much volume in some of the terms you were going. Yeah, you may not have a lot, but you know that those people searching for those terms are very. Maybe not even on the discovery line, maybe they're in the intent buy line. So that's something that I would say, optimize for and other tools.

Semrush is great. that's paid for plugin. there's other keyword ones, keyword planner also asked. There's lots of tools out there, that does keyword discovery, but I would say, start with. Search Console and Webmaster Tools, they're free, And it gives you insight on what's there already.

[00:32:45] Katie Keith: in Yoast, we have some connections and integrations with Semrush that lets you find a focus keyword and gives you suggestions for other keywords, which you may want to add into that post or page or it may inspire you to create another piece of content about that Yeah, that's good advice, the thing I'm less sure about is the role of link building and off page SEO. I've heard in the last six months or so that Google is saying that links to your site is less important than it used to be. And when I focus on link building at the moment, I'm typically trying to go for things that might actually generate sales.

Normally roundup posts, like top 10 WooCommerce product options plugins, I want to be as high as possible in all of those. that's the main kind of link building we're focusing on because regardless of the SEO benefits that could actually generate sales for us and of credibility and so on.

what do you know, Alex, about how important for SEO link building is these days?

[00:33:46] Alex Moss: it depends who you ask. link building depends on who you ask in terms of white hat versus black hat because you can still manipulate the algorithm. I've never been an advocate for that.

I've always been a white hat, organic marketing kind of person. So when you say link building, it depends from an SEO perspective. You can go on, authoritative relevant sites, try and get a keyword with anchor text that has similar. things to what you're targeting, but also think in the future, right?

So I'm thinking about this video right now. at the end, you've asked where to find me. I'll tell you links to find me on, right? How do you not know that an NLM is going to? Read this video, which it can do right now, and then bring that in to informational based results and use it towards valuing us three, this talk, our brands, all as a result.

And it all goes towards, I don't know, a video based knowledge graph, if you want to call it that. And all of those things combined is kind of like link building, but it's doing it for you, but goes, again, to the normal marketing point of view. I'm getting out there, this is part of it. Yoast brand, my personal brand, me being here, you're also getting something from it because I've got some expertise in talking about something.

We're talking about very specific stuff right now, SEO and WordPress product development, I would like to think that this video or the content within this video is going to be used. If someone's searching for SEO and WordPress product development, it may not be able to now cause it's in video form, but that's just going back to the link building.

Do your community building, do digital PR, and the more people that will talk to you, the more people will cite you on different platforms and that's organic link acquisition in a nutshell, But yes, it's still important because these LLMs still have to reference some sort of visibility and authority based on third party visibility saying that thing.

[00:35:41] Katie Keith: Yeah, that makes sense. the biggest challenge for me is how to measure the results of SEO work. the holy grail, which has been driving my marketing team mad for over a year now, is how to know which pages, generally blog posts on our site, are generating conversions. And that is surprisingly difficult.

GA4 track something like 20 percent of our conversions. We don't know what the problems are. We're using Matomo, which is a bit better, but it's still not perfect. It's just been incredibly difficult to know which pages are generating conversions.

do you have any advice on that? Or is it even worth bothering with?

[00:36:22] Alex Moss: I could talk about that for quite a while, but you have to correlate things like Search Console telling you, not guesswork, because there's ways of doing it by manipulating data, this is where ChatGPT can come in, you can copy and paste raw, CSV files and tell it to understand things more.

think about the connection between the keywords you're ranking for, the pages that people are coming into, which can get with Search Console and Webmaster Tools and your analytics. then you have to try and correlate that with where the sales are coming from as an entrance page in analytics.

It's been hard to connect the two It's kind of impossible to get that perfect view. And that's what data scientists have full time jobs trying to do in large corporations every single day. it takes, more and more data The only way you can do that is if you do it through ads and that's perfect, right, that reporting.

Funny how, how that happens. And yet back in the day, I've, I've been in the SEO game a long time to remember old version of Google Analytics where they, they literally had, this is the keyword, this is where they went. And this is how many conversions are attributed to it. But other more greater black hat SEOs use abused.

That data to their advantage by then doing over optimization, spam, black hat tactics. So they took the nice things away because of, unethical SEOs and it's a shame, right? But it also keeps us on our toes because if the answer was just there, if everyone could just answer that thing all the time, then I believe that creativity and content production would be more mediocre.

And again, that plays back into AI. If you're just mediocre and you're just in the crowd with another 49 people, and there's 50 of you on there, if you're not doing something unique, or you're not doing what everyone else is doing in the most unique way, then you're just going to be like the other 49. And whilst people may talk about you, they won't talk about you as much as number one.

[00:38:17] Matt Cromwell: Do you have experience with different, non GA4 platforms? A lot of folks are really frustrated with the launch of GA4, and, Looking for, sometimes, more privacy focused analytic platforms. Monomo does have a privacy, focus a little bit.

I use Plausible quite a bit. do any of these, matter from your perspective in terms of tracking? Do you see any that do a better job of helping with organic results?

[00:38:42] Alex Moss: Yeah, a little bit. they can give you some data, but I would say try it, right? Because it's not expensive. I think there's even, a free version of both?

I'm annoyed that you said plausible because I was going to show off and say, oh, there's plausible, but you've obviously used it. And I can't remember the third one. There is a third one. I do remember using all of them.

[00:39:01] Matt Cromwell: Fathoms and everyone.

[00:39:02] Alex Moss: So, I remember doing the research, but it was more from a GDPR point of view and cookie tracking.

my personal findings were that with Google Tag Manager, especially the larger enterprise kind of sites, Those solutions aren't as good, but, you know, this audience, if you're not working, most of you probably aren't working for large enterprise and you're, you know, starting out, I would say use all of them, find out which one's for you.

None of them, I would say use two at the same time. So maybe keep GA4 and then use Fathom for the week's trial and see what it does with the two. you may find that, there's a nice nugget of one area of reporting that Fathom's really doing right. Maybe that's worth the 20 euros a month to get that one sale a month you need,

it's always worth getting. more data, you can't have too much data, when it comes to analyzing your site and comparing it against the benchmark that you've only known one benchmark is Google Analytics.

No one has any experience with anything else. So yeah, I would say try them all out, some people may find that they've got something great and other people will just find it's not it's not for them.

[00:40:14] Matt Cromwell: I hear that for sure. I mean, that's another thing that was a little bit frustrating for us there was a time.

When Google was saying really, really loudly that WebCore Vitals is like so important, that your search results are going to get hurt if your site is slow, but then they started shifting to say, well, it's not about just slowness, it's about like the experience people have on your website.

We were really trying hard to make our site faster. and we found that one of the things that was slowing down the site the most was using Tag Manager for analytics. like that, that was really one of the biggest, and it's like, well, Google's giving us these tools and telling us.

Not to use these tools? it was one of those conflicting things. running two analytics at the same time, to me, just sounds like, I'm gonna really slow down the website. I feel like if things are getting better on that front, in many ways, I think loading things locally as much as possible, with native scripts and doing only first party cookie stuff as much as possible, I think all that stuff is and I, I do like Plausible a lot.

I haven't been able to use it on any of our, Stellar brands yet. but I do find a lot of value in it. It's really simple. I did notice that, somebody on the awesome motive team, John Turner launched a one page GA, tool, which looks really, really interesting, a one page GA4, product, essentially, that, basically boils down your GA4 experience into just one page that ideally I would assume would be a lot more actionable and digestible.

[00:41:39] Alex Moss: I think that's a really smart idea. people love a one pager, right? a lot of information, but not too much information, what's digestible, for me, but yeah, I haven't checked it out yet, but I, did notice that it had been released in the last week.

[00:41:56] Katie Keith: Okay, before we finish, let's move on to best advice for WordPress product owners. mine is that new product owners who don't have an established brand or website should be doing organic SEO. But choose something realistic. Find keywords which aren't too competitive.

some of the keyword tools Alex mentioned earlier provide a competitiveness score so you can see that. Typically, that will mean starting off with long tail keywords, which means whole phrases rather than just one word. WooCommerce plugins, WordPress plugins. Don't bother. You're never going to rank for it.

Go for something really specific like I did with WooCommerce password protected categories and things like that. That's where smaller WordPress products have a better chance of ranking organically for something. So that's my best advice. Alex, what's your best advice?

[00:42:53] Alex Moss: stay long tail, as in be specific, answer a question that you predict someone may ask to try and discover your plugin.

have a brand story as well. like Barn2, I looked up, it was the name of the company. The barn that you're in, first office, good story, good brand. FireCask is, I was at a beer festival and saw a cask and thought that was a good word and then we spent the rest of the night putting words in front of and after cask until we found domains that are available.

There's that way as well, but then there's things like Yoast, right? Yoast is called Yoast because the founder is Yoast, but no one could spell his name, so he just got that and told people to go there. it has a story and it's just like the tip of the iceberg of, why you're doing something that you're doing as well.

what's the problem that you're solving? what's the benefit to me? Why should I choose you, as a brand and a person and not the next company that's offering a very similar thing? what's unique about your products that isn't? unique to anyone else. what's the USP?

Why, and think about MLP as well versus MVP. you want a most lovable product. Why is it lovable? What's there to love and promote that and naturally things will follow.

[00:44:02] Matt Cromwell: I'm going to cheat a little bit. I got two pieces of best advice. the first one, is spend the time necessary to implement your analytics rightly and thoroughly.

there's no shortcuts here. if you're not getting, the information, you can't do anything. Like you can't understand where your traffic's coming. You can't understand which terms are working and which aren't. If you don't have Things implemented, correctly and thoroughly, in the first place.

Of course, then you have to follow up and actually pay attention to that stuff and try to continue to optimize. It's a ongoing process, but you can't do any of that ongoing process if you don't have things set up right in the first place. it's not like a one click thing.

You can't just install a plugin and everything works correctly. You really got to try to dial it in right, and make sure that you're getting the best, results. from Google Search Console and Bing web tools as well. and then your analytics platform, whatever it might be, and, make sure you do it in a way that's not slowing down your website, so spend that time.

The other one that I see happening too often in the WordPress space is people writing tons of content. And so little of it actually being relevant to their products. lots of generic WordPress content on your website is not necessarily going to help drive conversions. you might get

[00:45:12] Katie Keith: Best WordPress

[00:45:13] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. All these crazy listicles that are just like generic interest stuff might drive traffic, actually. You might get found that way, but then nobody cares about what's actually on your website. So focus your content around your products any and every way you can and don't focus on anything else.

Like, don't try to reach out and be like, Oh, here's something else that's tangentially somewhat kind of related. there's definitely ways you could think about it in terms of, things that pair nicely. Like we at Give, we write often about, fundraising practices in general.

and that's because the people who are looking for a donation plugin are trying to do online fundraising. so there are ways that you could talk about it that way. but if we started all of a sudden talking about how to create a nonprofit, That's not necessarily the right, vertical to be, focusing our content on for our purpose in particular.

So those are my two, spend the time to get your analytics right and focus your content on your products as much as possible.

[00:46:13] Alex Moss: I wanted to add one more bonus one, get more involved with the community, go into Slack groups. There are quite a few, I mean, As an example, I'm doing a favor making a website because I'm the guy who can create websites for people who know me non professionally.

So for my mother in law, she created, she's helping out a charity in short, and she's created a product, a calendar, for this charity. whether she scales it or not is another thing, but I created this website and was using GravityForms because I didn't want to go into WooCommerce or anything like that.

And it's all about product. I had a question about, Gift Aid. So I went into post datus, and I asked a question, I said, I'm on Gravity Forms, I need to Do something about gift aid. I also had a weird calculation of postage, for every two calendars you purchased, it would add five pounds to shipping,

when you start doing development, it's a nice little puzzle to solve with the gift aid I was told about GiveWP as a solution, that was, a great example of maybe not SEO, but it's definitely link building.

The link is inside Slack. I click the link, I looked into GiveWP, and whilst it wasn't a solution for what I want right now, because it's selling a product, Gravity was just doing what I needed it to do. I now know about GiveWP, and then, weirdly, when we were arranging this, I was like, Matt's part of GiveWP, and then it all connects, and now I definitely remember GiveWP.

So if anyone in the future may mention it, that's what I'm going to do. Just like Yoast as well, He is an SEO and, was and is an authority in WordPress. those things combined work perfectly in the small community that we're in.

And go to WordCamps because I guarantee you'll meet five developers. One of those developers will know someone who will need to deal with something that one of your products may be the solution to.

[00:48:00] Matt Cromwell: love it.

[00:48:03] Katie Keith: Well, that's a wrap. Alex, thank you so much for joining us. And where can people find you online?

[00:48:08] Alex Moss: Yeah, so you can find centrally, I would say alex mos. co. uk. That's where all my links are. But I'm active on Twitter, at Alex Mos. I'm on LinkedIn. I've just not found the best engagements on there.

But yeah, you can find me there and also, I'm around Yoast and in these communities in Slack, wherever you may want to find me.

[00:48:28] Matt Cromwell: Excellent. Everybody tune in next week. We have another guest named Alex Carlis. he's going to talk with us about A B testing, which is a perfect, follow up to this whole conversation.

you can do a lot of really good work. by figuring out your SEO results, through A B testing as well. he has a great A B testing plugin, and we're going to bring him on and talk all about that.

[00:48:49] Alex Moss: That's great because SEO is just getting someone to your site. That's only half the battle. Once they're on, You need to get them converted, right?

Exactly.

[00:48:58] Katie Keith: special thanks to PostStatus for being our green room. If you're enjoying these shows, do us a favor and hit like, subscribe, share it with your friends, reference this show in your newsletters, we hope to see you next week. Bye!